


A Cracked Mirror

by texaspeach



Category: Naruto
Genre: Angst, F/M, Female Uzumaki Naruto, Gen, Tragedy, pre-time travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-05
Updated: 2018-10-05
Packaged: 2019-07-25 16:48:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16201619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/texaspeach/pseuds/texaspeach
Summary: Sacrifices must be made.





	A Cracked Mirror

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Loeka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Loeka/gifts).



> I have never read Naruto. Or watched it beyond a few scenes that my husband wanted me to see. I was never all that interested in it.
> 
> Until [A Stranger](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5059978/chapters/11637067) by [Loeka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Loeka/pseuds/Loeka).
> 
> Now, I am consuming Naruto fanfiction at a slightly (read: extremely) alarming rate and every bone in my body is screaming at me to write it myself. So I am. With Loeka lovingly guiding and betaing along the way. Thank you, my dear!
> 
> (Also, Loeka, happy friendiversary! It's close enough to it at this point.)

They’re lucky - the cave is just big enough for the seal. A seal that took both Kazane and Obito to paint, despite the Uzumaki being the Fūinjutsu prodigy and the Uchiha only having one eye left. The seal is too complicated and too damn big for only one person to paint it, especially when there’s a crazed moon goddess after them.

For how difficult the seal is, the plan is surprisingly simple. Draw seal. Transplant Sharingan. Let Obito bleed out. Use Kurama’s chakra to fling herself back in time. Save the world from the plans of a bat-shit crazy plant thing. Easy, dattebayo!

Kurama stirs in the back of her mind. _Do you really think it will be that easy, kit?_ he rumbles sardonically.

Kazane frowns and refuses to answer. Of course it won’t be that easy. She’s Uzumaki Kazane, and nothing has ever, ever come easy in her life. But thinking of it like that is the only reason she isn’t freaking out over knowingly and willingly sacrificing her companion for her own gain.

And she has to be the one to do it. Obito can’t just slit his own wrists - it wouldn’t be a sacrifice that way. She has to be the one to cut his throat, to let his lifeblood spill over the painstakingly inked lines of the seal, to let him die so she might— pain explodes across the back of her head and she faceplants on the floor.

“What was that for?” she whines, rolling over to glare at her companion. The pain is already fading - the perks of being a jinchūriki - but she still feels the need to complain about it.

“You were angsting,” the Uchiha grunts, dragging his gunbai back toward his side. “I could feel it all the way over here.” He’s by the entrance to the cave, reading over his notes for the last time before the transplant. Though it actually isn’t all that tricky to move it from one person to another, the problem is that the person receiving it is Kazane, who has more chakra than she knows what to do with most of the time. If it isn’t done just right, the eye’s ultimate ability could be burnt out before ever being used, and then all of this preparation, all of their hopes, would be for nothing.

Kazane sticks her tongue out at him. There’s nothing more she can do until Obito deems himself ready enough to do the surgery, so she busies herself with making sure there’s no Zetsus within a hundred miles of their “base.” After the last clash with Kaguya and her forces, Obito had been all but useless after expending so much chakra, and Kazane had been forced to draw on Kurama’s strength more than she ever had before. The Kyūbi’s speed got them away from the enemy, putting more distance between them than anything other than Kamui, and so far nothing had found them yet. But their luck - hers and Obito’s both - sucks majorly, so she’s expecting Zetsus to find them any day now that the seal is ready.

Speaking of ready… She doesn’t want to _rush_ Obito, because it seems kind of insensitive what with it being pretty much the same as rushing him to his death, but she doesn’t really think he can be any more prepared for the transplant either.

There’s a sigh from Obito’s direction, along with the fluttering of paper, and Kazane perks up. “Are you ready, then?” she asks.

He levels a deadpan stare at her that’s no less eloquent for only having one eye. “What do you think, you moron?” He strides over without waiting for an answer, kneeling beside and motioning at their combined bedroll. She follows along willingly enough, letting him help her to lie flat on her back.

(There are times she can see the Obito Kakashi remembered, rather than the one who went crazy and tried to take over the world. Not always, because he’s still a snarky bastard at the best of times, but on occasion. It’s a shame Kakashi isn’t alive to see it.)

“I can't sedate you,” he reminds her. “I don't trust the Kyūbi - Kurama,” he amends at her glare, “to not try to heal you while you're asleep. It's habit for him by now, so you might have to fight it.”

_I know I can't heal you_ , Kurama growls in the back of her head. _I'm over a millennium old - I don't need a child to remind me._

“He says to shut up,” Kazane tells her companion cheerfully.

_That is NOT what I said, brat!_

‘That's what you meant, you grumpy old fox.’ 

Kurama subsides with a grumble, and Kazane looks up at Obito. “Are you sure? We can still find another way.”

Obito smiles slightly, touches her cheek gently. “You and I both know there's no other way,” he says, not unkindly. “The seal won't work without this much blood, and I'm not powerful enough to both activate the seal and power my Sharingan.”

His hand, wreathed with green, settles over her right eye. She takes a deep breath, lets it out, and nods.

“Let's do it, dattebayo.”

*** 

Her throbbing head is what wakes her up. She groans, bringing a hand up to her forehead, and freezes when she feels her hitai-ate gone and bandages wrapped around what feels like half her face. She carefully opens her left eye and looks around for Obito.

He’s sitting close by, in the center of the seal. His head is turned away from her, but the blood staining his hands and sleeves tells her enough. The transplant is finished. Now to see if the Uchiha’s theory about Kurama understanding how to use the Sharingan without training is correct. She sits up slowly, wincing as her head pulses particularly painfully, and pulls the bandages off.

The world explodes into sudden, vivid color. She can see _everything_ , from the natural chakra wafting off the walls of their cave to the blinding white lines of the seal underneath Obito. The pained, measured breaths he takes, the slightest hunch to his shoulders that tells her he didn’t bother to use any kind of pain relief for himself. The blood spatters on the seal are beginning to charge it slightly, and she rolls her eyes when she realizes he didn't even clean himself up.

The chakra drain isn’t a nuisance in the slightest, but learning how to use the Sharingan will be. Well, assuming she’ll even need to learn, that is. Kurama will hopefully have figured out how to use it already, so she can just rely on him. But the jump might well burn out the Mangekyo and render the eye blind. Or it might be that she could only use the baseline version. Or the eye could adapt to her chakra and make her the most powerful non-Uchiha user of a Sharingan in history. They have no idea what will happen.

Kazane grabs a shirt that’s seen better days from her pack. Might as well take her new eye for a test drive, just to make sure one of them can use it, right? “Be right back,” she says, and prods Kurama into opening a portal as she completes the signs Obito showed her. He could do it without them easily, but, as with any jutsu, it’s best to start at the beginning.

Kurama feeds his chakra to the Sharingan, but the transportation is so quick she can't follow how it works, focused on the signs as she was. They land in the weird halfway dimension with the pillars and she does the signs again, letting Kurama take them to a nearby hot spring. Again, she can't quite grasp the feeling of how it works, and she resigns herself to letting Kurama do the heavy lifting for a while.

She’s back with Obito before the shirt-turned-rag stops steaming. “I'm back,” she announces, not wanting to startle Obito into accidentally attacking her.

“It worked, then?” Obito’s voice is a mixture of smugness - he isn’t a med-nin, no matter the skills he’s picked up, and this was a delicate operation done blindly - and relief.

“Yep,” she replies, kneeling down in front of him. She touches his hand, runs her fingers up his arm until she can reach his face. “You did it, asshole.” Belying the harshness of her words, her hand is gentle as she wipes the dried blood from his face.

Sasuke always said she was too forgiving. Usually, he was referring to himself, but occasionally he branched out into any of the numerous enemies-turned-allies she’d persuaded to their side when anyone else would have just killed them and been done with it. She prefers to think of it as not holding a grudge. Okay, yeah, so Obito set Kurama on Konoha, killed most of the Uchiha clan, and kinda sorta brought about the end of the world and got everybody but the two of them killed, but in the end he was just as much of a pawn as the rest of Akatsuki was. He’d been manipulated, brainwashed even, by Madara and Zetsu into believing that he was the only one who could bring peace to the world.

She knows just how lucky she was to avoid a fate like that. She knows that if someone had taken her under their wing when she was just a child, just starting the Academy, she would have followed them just about anywhere. Hell, it could have been a missing-nin who’d picked her up and she would have given them her loyalty for just a scrap of kindness. (She still thinks of Haku sometimes, the lovely boy who gave his life for the man who saved him, and how that could have been her.)

And she’s learned about Obito and his life before the Kannabi Bridge incident. It was always spoken of in fits and starts, always on the defensive. The orphaned bastard of an Uchiha mother and a non-Uchiha father, he was treated with indifference by most of the clan. Not because he was a bastard, but because he was only half Uchiha. He was dead last in the Academy, terrible at just about everything shinobi-related, and deemed as practically worthless. Kakashi despised him, Rin didn’t really see him, and Minato didn’t have much time for him. What kindness he received was sporadic at best, and it wasn’t until Madara that he got constant positive affirmation the way most people did from the day they were born. Is it really any wonder he latched onto one of the few people to treat him kindly?

(She does wonder if time and distance and malice have warped his memories somewhat. Even Kazane had a few people who were kind to her, and she was the living reminder of all that was lost during the Kyūbi’s attack. Surely at least her dad and Rin were kind to him, even if Kakashi was, in her sensei’s own words, a “rule-obsessed bastard.”)

So yes, maybe she does forgive too easily. But she knows what life is like with so little kindness, being the jinchūriki of the Kyūbi, and really, hating him at this point? When they’re the last two living people in the _world_? It isn’t worth it. She would much rather treat everyone the way she always wanted to be treated when she was a little girl. So she’s treated Obito with all the kindness he’d never truly gotten, and she’s never regretted it.

His breath hitches at the tender touch of the wet cloth as she does the best she can to clean his face. It had been such a long time since he’d been touched simply for the sake of touching that it took several months for him to stop flinching every time she so much as brushed up against him. It took several more weeks before he began to initiate contact on his own, but once he started, it was as though a dam had broken. Suddenly he was always right up against her, always touching her in some way. And since she was nearly as touch-starved as he was, she never complained.

It’s probably inevitable that they started sleeping together. Platonically at first - even Kazane found it difficult to think about sex with the man who got all her friends and family killed - but adrenaline is a tricky thing, and it resolves itself in whatever way it can. And if that way happens to be a quick and hard fuck in the first cave they found to hide in after a narrow escape, well. It happens, right?

And when Obito wanted to ignore what had happened between them, she didn’t let him. She plopped down on his lap, still completely naked, and proceeded to lecture him on exactly why that wasn’t going to happen, and why they damn well would be doing that again. She still isn’t sure if he changed his mind because of her arguments or because she was naked, sitting in a very provocative spot, and wiggling in his lap as she gesticulated, but whatever the case, she won. Well, they both won in the end, she supposes, what with multiple orgasms on the line, but she totally won the argument. Maybe it’s true that men could only think with one head at a time after all.

_Brat, it’s time_ , Kurama says suddenly. Kazane frowns and puts down the shirt, tilting her head and focusing. Her power flows over the land, not enough to get anything - anyone’s - attention, but enough to tell her why the Kyūbi is pushing her into action.

Obito is well-attuned to her moods by this point and frowns. “What is it?” he asks.

“Zetsus,” she growls. “Still a ways off, but we need to do this now.”

They stare at each other. Well, she stares at him, anyway; his face is just turned in her direction. There’s quiet for a moment, and then Obito takes a breath that’s only slightly unsteady. “All right,” he murmurs. He takes a kunai out of a pocket and holds it out to her. “Just… make it quick. Please.” His voice is even, but his hand is shaking.

Kazane doesn’t take it. Instead, she puts a hand on his face, tracing the ridges of the scars and his cheekbones, sweeping his hair out of his face so she can see him properly one last time. His Sharingan - her Sharingan, now - is still active, as it has to be in order for the seal to work. It’s only right that she remembers this forever, both the way he looks now and the way he will in just a moment, sacrificed by her hand.

The Uchiha scoffs and grabs her wrist, pulling her forward so he can wrap his arms around her. “You’re angsting again,” he scolds, and kisses her. It isn’t soft or sweet; it’s full of anger and despair and self-hatred and it hurts her heart to feel the emotions. But she allows it, lets him cling to her for comfort for the last time as one hand inches toward his own.

She grasps his kunai and, lightning quick, slices it cleanly across his throat.

Warmth splashes down her front as blood pours out of the wound. He chokes, green-glowing hands reflexively going to his neck to heal it, but she forces them down and pulls him toward her. “I’m sorry,” she gasps, burying her face in his hair and embracing him tightly to keep him from struggling. “I’m so sorry, Obito, Sage, I’m sorry. Tell them I’m going to fix it, I’m going to fix everything. They’ll all be safe and I’ll save you too, I promise."

She holds him until his body slumps against hers and she feels the bright glare of his chakra flicker and die. 

The seal underneath them glows, getting brighter and brighter with every second that passes. Distantly, she feels the Zetsus’ attention fasten on their location, feels them pick up speed, feels them closing the distance.

It’s now or never. She has to activate the seal now or else Obito’s sacrifice will be for nothing.

She forces herself to lay Obito’s body on the ground, kissing his forehead before she stands up. There’s no time to grab her pack; everything important she keeps in a seal inked onto her left forearm, anyway. Her hands form the seals needed, quickly but precisely, and their chakra - hers and Kurama’s - begins to pour into the seal etched into the ground. She plants her feet and keeps herself upright despite the drain; she has to hold the last seal until the very end or else she’ll be lost between worlds forever.

The end comes more quickly than she expects, considering how much power is needed to fuel the seal. But her reserves are better than expected, considering, and even Kurama, who’d provided much of the chakra, is only mildly exhausted. Between the two of them, they have enough power to use Kamui and fling themselves back in time to stop all of this from happening.

Kazane releases the last hand seal and makes the new combination of seals to start their journey.

A root stabs her straight through the heart just before her body turns intangible and she gasps, blood bubbling to her lips. 

Kurama roars and everything goes black.

***

When she wakes up, she’s in a forest.

When she wakes up, the cage is torn to pieces.

When she wakes up, she can't feel Kurama.

When she wakes up, she is completely, utterly alone.

She curls into a ball and cries.

 

**Author's Note:**

> There will (eventually) be more. But I thought I'd put this out there and see how much you guys liked it first. :)


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